Venice, September 13, 2015 – Films are like wrapped bonbons: The covers can be enticing but the contents cater to different tastes among \audiences, critics and prize-awarding juries. A heavily stacked Latino jury this year awarded the 72ndVenetian Film Festival’s top award, the Golden Lion, to the Venezuelan film‘Desde Alla’ (From Afar) and the Silver Lion to an Argentine film, ‘The Clan.’ Neither of the two Latin-American films was bad or evenmediocre though among a constellation of sparkling new movies their choice was similar to picking a prize from the tombola – blindfolded. ‘Desde Alla’ directed by Lorenzo Vigas, 47 (who made sureduring his acceptance speech everyone knew the head of the jury was his artistic mentor and some of the members his good friends) tells the entangled story of ahate-love-hate homosexual relationship when one partner ‘comes out’ and theother opts to remain ‘hidden.’ The movie is gripping in its intensity and the kinkiness of two men still uncertain about their sexual orientation. In contrast ‘The Clan’ is straight forward drama. PabloTrapero’s recreation of a family’s brutal kidnap industry with the connivanceof military big-shots is set a few months before democracy returned to Argentina. Based on a true story the middle class family is dominated by an authoritarianfather who uses the fame of his son, a national rugby star, to capture wealthyvictims and maintains an iron discipline over his family. The victims are kept like animals in the basement of the family home and are generally executed after the ransom is paid in U.S. dollars. Startling in its gratuitous violence and utterdisregard for human life, the drama fits into our modern era dominated by greed, corruption and an evil without conscience. No surprise ‘The Clan’ is already abox office hit in Buenos Aires. Though feature films won the main prizes this year’s VenetianFilm Festival was a firework of documentaries or a re-creation of what the film credits announced as ‘Based on a True Life Story’ or ‘Based on Actual Events.’For the fans of fiction it seemed the majority of film makers had suddenly discovered reality can be far more entertaining and plausible then fantasy or fairy tales. The main problem with re-telling history is that the writer/director/producer or historian can paint brush the narrative with personal prejudices and is always able to graft a more commercial version onto knownfacts. From its very first day the Venice Film Fest was rich inscreenings based on ‘true life.’ It began with Baltasar Kormakur’s 3Dblockbuster the disastrous 1996 assault on the summit by glory-seeking climbers who paid 65000 dollars to be dragged and oxygenized to the top of the world.This rather cheaply shot film on mountains hardly resembling the Himalayas (with the exception of a few aerial shots) was followed by Ivgeny Afineesky’s Winteron Fire, a patchwork of newsreel shots of the Ukrainian Orange Revolution on Maidan Square. Renato di Maria’s ‘Italian Gangsters’ is the tale of Italy’s postWorld War II bandits, youngsters educated during the partisan and fascist yearsof World War II violence who just kept doing after the war what they had learned during the war – only this time for personal profit. Much acclaimed as a work of art was Frederick Wiseman’s 190-minute marathon ‘In Jackson Heights,’ the breakdown of a functionalmulti-cultural society in Queens, New York by corporate real estate deals. Anda favorite of documentary buffs was Alexander Sokurov’s ‘Francofonia.’ It tellsthe gripping story of how sensitive men from both Germany and Francecollaborated to save the art treasures of the Louvre Museum during the rapacious days of World War II, an example of cultural heritage transcending the stupidityof war. Israel’s prolific film maker Amos Gitai in ‘Rabin’s Last Day’ documented the whitewashed inquest into the Israeli Prime Minister’s 1995 assassination. (see attached separate story). Yann Arthus Bertrand, famous for his aerial documentaries of theearth, this time produced an artful 191-minute look at the people of our world and Amy Berg’s ‘Janis’ was yet another version of the life of singerJanis Choplin. Laurie Anderson’s ‘Heart of a Dog,’ much applauded, is Anderson’s meditative, poetic and philosophical tribute in words and images to her rat terrier and, perhaps, to her late husband, musician Lou Reed. Next in the potpourri of movies came the true sagas, dramatized re-creations led by ‘Spotlight’ Thomas McCarthy’s gripping reconstruction of the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize winning exposure of 87 pedophile priests inBoston, shuffled from diocese to diocese with the full knowledge and connivanceof the city’s catholic hierarchy. Scott Cooper’s ‘Black Mass’ the rise and fall of crime lord James ‘Whitey’ Bulger in the Boston of the 1970s had a half bald Johnny Depp in thelead role. The film is as bloodcurdling as it is infuriating to watch theinvolvement of an FBI agent and the blinkered response of the agency in anAmerica where graft and corruption in high places results no longer in occasional scandals but, like in the rest of the world, has become a way of life. Corruption percolates through most films, both in the West and the East. Among the most applauded feature films was Tom Hooper’s controversial biographical drama ‘The Danish Girl’ the first documented gender- change surgery carried out in the 1920s. Danish artist Einar Wegener becomes Lili Elbe, first as a transvestite then a woman by surgery. The film is a deeply humane story of a person born male but feeling inside the body of a female. Lili was aliveat a time when homosexuality was still a crime and cross dressing ‘unacceptable’ among bisexuals. Hooper deals gently and compassionately with his delicatesubject. The role of Einar and of Lili is played in a dazzling performance byBritish actor Eddie Redmayne who also brought Steve Hawkins to the screen and seems to grow into his roles as if transplanted. The backdrop to this unique storyis the fairytale scenery of Hans Christian Anderson’s Denmark and the flappertime of the Belle Époque in the Paris of the 1920s. Afineesky’s ‘Winter on Fire’, startling but almost boring with its endless newsreel shots of police brutality, tries excessively hard to show astudent-people insurrection without ever clarifying who were the forces, the financiers and the beneficiaries of a revolt that remains as puzzling today as it was after the last shots were fired. The documentary still leaves the key question unanswered: What did these courageous people bleed and die for? ‘Everest’ too leaves a similar dilemma: Did its director intend to strike a blow against the blatant profiteering of organized Mt Everest climbswhen guides drag some medically unfit people up to the summit, people whoshould never have made the climb but were apparently accepted for their money.Or did the film attempt to glorify the heroism of the two New Zealand guides who perished while attempting to escort their charges down through a blizzard? For those worried by the plethora of documentaries or recreationsof ‘true stories’ be assured fiction still exists at the Venice Film Fest. The one film not to miss is Atom Egoyen’s English-German coproduction ‘Remember’ a nerve-tickling thriller with many twists and a diabolically brilliant climax that had the audience gasping in surprise. Suffice tosay, without giving away the end, two ninety year olds, one suffering fromAlzheimer’s, the other wheelchair bound and trip-fed, plan to find and kill thetwo block commanders they hold responsible for killing their families atAuschwitz. The film is surely intended as a warning the hunt for the bad guysnever ends. The idea of irreversible fate permeates Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s riveting film ‘’11 Minutes” a confetti of peoples’ lives whirling across the screen until the pieces are caught in one centrifugal event. In “Go With Me” Swedish director Daniel Alfredson captures the bleak cold environment of a logging community that lives in fear of an evil boss,an ogre even the police refuse to confront. Led by Anthony Hopkins, always a joyto watch, two men and a woman set out to bring an end to the evil - an enterprisethat possibly takes a little too long. Cary Fukunaga’s chilling ‘Beasts of the Nation’ brings the audience face to face with the drama of child-soldiers recruited by force in Africa and the horror of the psychopathic self-proclaimed rebels running genocidal civil wars in Africa. As always Italy’s great film maker Marco Bellochio regaled hisfans with brilliantly shot imagery of a bygone rural Italy where nuns were still walled-in for cavorting with Satan and made to pass through the ordeals of a trialby water, fire and torture to make them confess. In the second part of his film Bellochio switches to modern rural Italy in the same area still in the hands of theold mafia associated now with corporate power, not any different from the olddays when fanatical priests ruled. Luca Guadagnino’s ‘A Bigger Splash’ with Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes in the leads is a melodramatic and articulate epic of the dysfunctionallives of big stars who cart with them - even during holidays on an idyllic island - their baggage of broken relationships until one day one of these explodes into violence. Though scorned by critics Xavier Giannoli’s ‘Marguerite’ must not be forgotten for it gave us a peek into our sycophantic society whose members areready to kowtow and applaud the rich and generous. The millionaire ladyMarguerite sings arias at private recitals horribly out of tune. While ridiculingthe poor women behind her back the crowd of sycophants (all gorging themselveson her lavish banquets) encourage the lady to sing in public and even hire an impoverished tenor as her coach. Surely it is the exposure of the flaws and joie de vivre of oursocieties that sends us scrambling each year to the Venice Film Fest and its chocolate box of flavors imported from every corner of the world.